"I'm a poet" and the social implications of voice and agency

I started "In Search of America" without really knowing what I was reading.  Part of the way through I made my way over to the blog to find the discussion questions.  I was so taken by the reality projected by the narrative that I hardly wanted to accept that this piece was fiction.  Because the narrator labeled himself as a writer from the East, concerned with the conditions of the workers in the West, I had a hard time imagining this story as being complete fiction.  None of it seemed like fiction; the first-person, objective point-of-view read like Hemingway's third-person objective POV.  (I now read on this interweb thingy that they were both part of the famous expatriate community in Paris.)

I was reading for agency, linking the narrator to the author--perhaps too much, but it's really hard not to with such a story.  I was looking for that discerning prism or lens of the author to reveal itself through the narrator, and it did.  Surely it could be found in every word by definition, but it appeared to me most boldly in some subjective, evaluative details provided by the author, particularly in distinguishing between the characters Chiver and Aragon as speakers and organizers.  The narrator inserts his evaluation of their efforts quite boldly when the situation cannot be made obvious through plain objective narrative: "though Chiver was the leader of this expedition it was Aragon that led" (293).

Yet here I still found it hard to believe this story belonged wholly in the realm of fiction.  I couldn't imagine that the author of this piece had not actually experienced what he was writing about.  It was all too real; he couldn't have taken too many authorial liberties in building characters.  I still imagine that Asch experienced most of what happened in this story.  But the end tied it all together so well with a single interaction with a single character, that I finally had to admit to myself that there must have been significant design at play in this piece, and by that I mean theme.  My reading experience began objective and without clear direction and ended with a new idea planted in my mind, substantiated by the body of the story.  Clearly, that's how Asch wanted it.

The theme I found was in voice.  "In Search of America" is a story of a narrator's interactions with others through their voices.  Each secondary character has a unique relationship to voice, both as individuals and as part of collectives.  Asch's narrator helps us sort through these voices and their significance, and the reader is given (at least) two important idea: an individual's voice is the product of the individual's condition, and every individual has a voice, regardless of his condition.  I haven't really expanded my idea of "voice" for you; my apologies for not doing it sooner.  By "voice" I mean the ability to make one's condition and thoughts known to others, a capacity derived from one's individuality and thinking mind.  Asch illustrates this in the very powerful ending in which a common, working man tells the narrator that he is a poet.

This scene returns to an objective lens; the character, his actions, and the setting of the dialogue is enough for the reader to draw the necessary meaning.  The agency of Asch as an author comes in, among other things, the fluctuation of the narrative lens between objectivity and subjectivity.  The strategic oscillation of the lens with regard to the examination of the voices of characters and the social circumstances of the voices is what makes this story a social criticism.  In Texarkana the narrator needed only to have eyes to see the conditions of the sharecroppers and needed only to hear their reluctance to be interviewed and the position of the owner in order to get his message across.  In Colorado the social implications of voice required that the narrator evaluate Chiver and Aragon in order to give the reader greater complexity of theme.

This story thus allows us to learn about agency as an author and agency in society.  In the narrator's search for answers about the conditions of the impoverished workers of the West, Asch both illuminates the injustices at hand and simultaneously reveals the social implications of voice.  The final section is particularly telling.  The narrator is warned by the voices of white collars not to visit the rough and tumble workmen's neighborhood, yet he courageously ignores them and finds a suppressed voice amid the chaotic barroom scene.  That the self-declared poet refuses to share his poetry reveals quite acutely the environmental suppression experienced by the working class.  The man's shaky articulation, though it may simply be reflective of his inebriation, more likely also displays his oppressed condition, particularly a significant lack of education.

OK, that was an update, and now the update is done.